Republican Sinn Féin, the oldest of the anti-Good-Friday-Agreement groups that emerged from the Provisionals, appointed a new president. The announcement of Seosamh Ó Mhaoileoin came as a surprise to many for he is a largely unknown figure within Irish republicanism. [Mehr lesen…]

Former Provisional Shane Paul O’Doherty argued in this newspaper last week that republican inmates didn’t qualify as prisoners of war. Here, historian Dieter Reinisch says O’Doherty’s view is at odds with British Government policy throughout the 20th century.

In an article published in this newspaper on January 5, Shane Paul O’Doherty argued that “captured (IRA) combatants could never qualify as prisoners of war” because they “did not conduct military operations according to the laws and customs of war”. [Mehr lesen…]

January 30 2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the launch of the “Tet offensive” in 1968 by North Vietnam forces and the National Liberation Front against the South Vietnam Army and the US military presence.

The offensive not only facilitated the changing public opinion in the USA on the Vietnam War and heralded revolutionary unrest throughout the world in 1968, twenty years later, the idea of a Tet-like offensive resurfaced in Ireland.

This piece will argue, however, that rather than a credible scenario, it was a wide-spread myth among the Irish Republican prisoners’ population that facilitated the departure of the IRA from Armalite to the ballot box. [Mehr lesen…]

A stabbing by an Egyptian teenager that left a Japanese man dead and two Irish men injured has reignited debates on immigration in Ireland. Irish Nationalist sentiments all too often turned into anti-Muslim racism as news spread that the attacker was a former asylum seeker to the United Kingdom who migrated to Ireland through the British North. [Mehr lesen…]

The fact that Irish Republican prisoners are held in British prisons in the North of Ireland causes conflict for the Northern Ireland Prison Service. Irish Republicans are Irish Nationalists, thus, their national identity is suppressed during their imprisonment in the British State. [Mehr lesen…]

I recently stumbled over following sentence on a widely read Irish blog: “Cumann na mBan (CnamB) has been subject to several splits down through the years.” This comment was made in response to claims that Cumann na mBan “never split.” This is an assumption I also regularly repeat in my own writings on the organisation. The sentence that Cumann na mBan had “several splits down through the years” suggests that various organisations have emerged from the Cumann na mBan tradition. [Mehr lesen…]